Fraud fighter: 'Faked research is endemic in China' | Hacker News Reader

Fraud fighter: 'Faked research is endemic in China'

newscientist.com

62 pointsdenzil_correa18 comments

HN readers interested in scientific research fraud issues may like the blog Retraction Watch

http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/

(which I'm pretty sure I learned about from another HN participant) with its worldwide reach in reporting on retractions of scientific journal articles. There is another source some HN participants may find of interest, a special issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science on the topic of replicability of psychology research. The entire contents of the November 2012 issue of the journal

http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/6.toc

are free to download for all members of the public, to spark discussion of research issues in psychology. There are some great reads by famous authors among those articles.

AFTER EDIT: Pertaining to the issue of submissions to Hacker News, one thing to look out for is mistaking the statements in a press release for statements actually supported by a peer-reviewed scientific journal article. Many journal articles that say a little are hyped by press releases that say a lot, which are then distorted by news articles by lazy reporters into announcements of "breakthroughs." We've seen a lot of submissions to HN like that over the years. The PhD Comics panel on "The Science News Cycle"

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

describes the process, with only just a little exaggeration for humorous effect.

Comments by earlier participants here on Hacker News alerted me to two particularly unreliable sources that I NEVER use as the basis of a new submission to HN.

PhysOrg appears to have been banned as a site to submit from by Reddit. ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. Users here on HN think there are better sites to submit from.

Comments about PhysOrg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869

"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249

"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/ (press release),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/ (video),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien... (paper).

"PhysOrg: just say no."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888

"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857

"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."

Comments about ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185

"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529

"Original source:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...

"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361

"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766

"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.

"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."

This is what worries me in all science (US included). While I don't think labs are actively going out of their way to make stuff up, I think critical thinking is being replaced "oh shit, I need to publish this before I submit XYZ grant". This is how/why basic research is getting sloppy. Someone publishes a study, it goes through he peer review system of the authors' friends, it gets published and even if everyone hates the paper, it stays out there.

My YC application was made specifically to address this issue and the more I read about this stuff, the more I am motivated to get to work.

There's a lot of less credible journals out there, it seems, that exist mostly to sell tickets to expensive conferences. Published is published, I guess.

Their (often volunteer) subject matter boards basically rubber stamp whatever goes through. It seems like a lot of these conferences have fallen for SCIgen-generated nonsense papers.

Absolutely, even the concept of less credible journals should NOT exist. The idea that a study is not good enough for a journal with some credibility, so lets get it published in Joe-Shmoe's journal of bad science is insane. Hence why we need a more open, social media based (ie, real time communication) method to communicate scientific data. Aside from the benefits of speed, you have a community of scientist that can talk about the data and if something sucks, it can get called out. I'm hoping this reduces the BS science that gets published and we can start to reserve resources for studies that actually progress knowledge.

" you have a community of scientist that can talk about the data and if something sucks, it can get called out."

This is the entire justification for credible journals in the first place.

You can't wish non-credible journals out of existence.

"This is the entire justification for credible journals in the first place." Care to elaborate? I'm not sure I'm getting your point.

Re: You can't wish... You are absolutely correct, it's something that takes an active effort. I'm optimistic that we can lower the impact of poor science that is published in those journals with open communications in science.

"The majority of cases exposed are plagiarism, the exaggeration of academic credentials and faked research papers, which are endemic in China."

This is not just a China problem. While researching some various programming challeges, I've encountered quite a few "articles", "blogs" and code-sharing sites with content of dubious and plagiarism nature. It pains me that the majority of the bad "authors' seem to be from certain cultures. This hurts the truly talented and honest people from these cultures/countries.

Your choice to compare academic papers with blogs and snippet sites, specifically on the metric of quality, confounds me.

We only expect one of the two groups of information to inform the life-altering (and potentially -ending) recommendations made by trusted physicians.

If we're in agreement about a general endemic of misinformation, though, that makes more sense. It does leave me wondering whether we underestimate the error rate of our native cultures' sources, though, due to subsumed experience with targeted fraud protection. In other words, maybe we miss local folly because we already know where not to look?

"We only expect one of the two groups of information to inform the life-altering (and potentially -ending) recommendations made by trusted physicians.

If we're in agreement about a general endemic of misinformation, though, that makes more sense."

Corruption and fraud are damaging in all aspects of society. Which occupation does more "damage" to a community/society/culture as a whole? A doctor? A banker? A programmer? A military leader? It depends on the situation.

I'd like to see universities take up the challenge of verifying research as part of undergraduate and graduate training. Government and private subsidy of this work would be well worth it.

I once came across a final paper written by a student at an Indian university as part of his bachelor's degree. It was basically a selection of Plan 9 papers, and some simple how-to documentation I had written up, poorly copy-pasted together to reach 50 pages. Three professors had signed off on it. I tried to reach the one with a listed email, to point out that he had passed an obviously plagiarized document, but his inbox was full. Not sure if he'd have cared anyway, cheating and plagiarism is extremely widespread there (one of my girlfriend's relatives is paying someone else to earn her teaching degree... and thus the cycle continues)

The headline should read 'Faked research pervasive in China,' not 'endemic'. The existing headline means that faked research doesn't occur outside of China, which is, of course, completely false. The word 'endemic' is incorrectly used in the headline of the article itself, and occurs in the article, so it is not the fault of the submitter. The editors New Scientist ought to know better.

I agree that the word choice could be improved to reduce sensationalism but technically 'endemic' has two definitions. The first seems to be what the author of the article and especially the interviewee intended.

"adjective Also, en·dem·i·cal. 1. natural to or characteristic of a specific people or place; native; indigenous: endemic folkways; countries where high unemployment is endemic."

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/endemic?s=t

> The existing headline means that faked research doesn't occur outside of China, which is, of course, completely false.

I was just curious about this. So, I looked up on the definition of 'endemic' and found the following definitions

   (of a disease or condition) Regularly found among particular people or in a certain area.

   Denoting an area in which a particular disease is regularly found

In my limited understanding, I think 'endemic' means that it is a trait or found regularly in a particular region. It does not mean it is not found outside that region. Right?

That was my initial understanding of "endemic"'s meaning as well. However the Oxford English Dictionary does have the following supplementary definition:

Quote: "2 (of a plant or animal) native or restricted to a certain country or area: a marsupial endemic to northeastern Australia"

Where interestingly, the OED does use the word "restricted" which means that the word could denote regional exclusivity as the parent interpreted.

Interesting and I looked this up in the Oxford Dictionary and found the following two meanings -

   1(of a disease or condition) regularly found among particular people or in a certain area:
   complacency is endemic in industry today
   [attributive] (of an area) in which a particular disease is regularly found:
   the persistence of infection on pastures in endemic areas


   2(of a plant or animal) native or restricted to a certain place:
   a marsupial endemic to north-eastern Australia

Clearly, 'endemic' in the current sense relates to definition 1 (a condition) rather than definition 2 (a plant or animal). I still think that there is no issue in English in the title. The title may have been a bit more euphemistic but I think it conveys the correct issue.

> The existing headline means that faked research doesn't occur outside of China

It doesn't mean that. It means that it regularly occurs in China. If you want to go with the epidemiological understanding, it would also mean that fraud doesn't need to be imported from outside of China.

Is says absolutely nothing about not-China.

We've heard of this once before in S. Korea in the case of the veterinarian Hwang Woo-Suk.

http://www.asianscientist.com/features/hwang-woo-suk-disgrac...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33476693/#.UKoiNeSzpIE

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15340240

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